180 Degrees
by Lirazel
Summary: “It is as though the triangle has collapsed, and without him, they do not know how to relate to each other.” RHr angsty oneshot


180 Degrees

"It is as though the triangle has collapsed, and without him, they do not know how to relate to each other." RHr angsty oneshot

_Warning: This is horrifically angst-ridden. I meant for it to turn out with a happy ending, but well…it just couldn't. So if you hate that sort of thing, read no further._

_Also: I really don't know why I insist on building plots around math concepts, considering that I am perfectly horrible at math and that I hate it. But here is the flip side to "Arithmetic." I apologize to any math-type people I might offend by my ignorance._

_Disclaimer: Not mine._

_---_

"A triangle," Remus announced one day when the three of them were arguing again, his quiet voice cutting through the brittle words flying back and forth, "is the strongest shape. It is formed of the least amount of sides to form a shape, it distributes its load most evenly. An equilateral triangle, with sides of the same length, resists all outside forces. The sides of squares can be forced from side to side, making completely different shapes. But no matter where a force presses on it, a triangle will not change its shape. The pyramids have stood four thousand years. Bridge supports are made out of triangles. It is the strongest."

In those later days, there was always something a little bitter about Remus' voice, a little weary, and half the time they could not tell if he was lecturing or teasing. Hermione called the comment a non sequitur, and Ron mocked her vocabulary, and Harry rolled his eyes. But it wasn't, really, and they all knew it, even Ron who was usually so dense about things like that.

But they forgot all about that conversation in the chaos of what came afterwards. There just isn't time to think about things like geometry when you're trying to keep yourself and the people you love alive.

They didn't have time to think of it at all—actually, Harry never got a chance to think about it—until the coffin was lowered into the ground.

Then she turns to him and he turns to her and they just look at each other.

It is all they can do. Something had changed, changed so suddenly and so completely that all of the cues and prompts and rules and routines and rituals they had relied on all their lives are gone, and they have nothing to lean against, nothing to tell them where they stand.

It is as though the triangle has collapsed, and without him, they do not know how to relate to each other. They had always stood the same distance apart, always added up to one hundred and eighty degrees between the three of them.

"Two lines," Hermione says one day, her voice flat and dead as her eyes, "don't make anything. Parallel lines never touch."

--

They live together just because they don't know how to live without each other, because they never learned how to be apart. But it isn't easy, companionable, or even awash with a sense of underlying promise the way it once was or would have been. They barely speak to each other, because for years their world revolved around him, and now they find that they have nothing to speak about.

---

She spends her days in the library, shelving books and selecting new ones to be added to the collection and reading when time allows. She lives in her books and yet does not live. He works with woods and broom corn and twine and what he makes are more like works of art than brooms. He finds satisfaction but no peace.

They are both very quiet.

But he always secretly hoped to be an Auror, and sometimes he will disappear for hours or sometimes even weeks and when he returns there is blood under his fingernails and guilt and vengeance and grief in his eyes. While he is gone she does not read or write or talk to anyone. She waits and waits and is never sure whether he will come back. When he does, he lays down beside her on the big bed and the tips of their fingers touch.

It is all they can ask.

---

Family and friends, eyes worried and desperate and confused, drop in at the beginning, but the visits become less frequent: the big, haunted house was always full of snakes and booby traps and doxies and dead things, but now it is full of pain, too.

After that, they receive invitations. They visit the Burrow sometimes, Bill and Fleur's house, the twin's flat, Neville's cottage. But they do not stay, not because of awkwardness or pain on their part—for they feel nothing and have felt nothing since that explosion of green light that decimated their world—but because it hurts their loved ones.

Only Ginny understands.

---

They avoided the two extremes of idolatry and forgetfulness. They build no shrines to him, do not leave his things exactly as they were, do not build him up in their minds until he is more than he ever could have been. Neither do they banish all reminders of him from their lives or leave the room when others begin to talk of him or try to push him to the corners of their minds.

They use some of his things—Ron has inherited some of his t-shirts and all his chocolate frog cards and Hermione has some of his books and his photographs. And they talk about him sometimes, when they talk at all: Harry would have liked that. Harry would know the answer.

And so, somehow, he lives in their minds exactly as he was.

---

Time does not exist anymore. It does not spread out before them nor race past them. They are suspended in a life of sad yellow light and a constant sense of expectancy. They do not live. They simply are.

---

After a while, their families insist that they are being morose, that they are locking themselves into prison. They do not care where they are, so they comply, they leave Grimmuald Street behind, they find a small cottage out in the country, and the fresh air feels warm against their skin. They grow a garden, have a cat (Crookshanks died long ago), and have Bill and Fleur's and Fred and Angelina's and even Percy and Penelope's children for visits. That is the only time they really feel alive, but living comes with a deep and searing pain, and they are just as glad to see them go as they are to see them come.

---

The rest of their lives is Hermione flooing to work and Ron working in the shed and omelets in the morning and taking turns cooking dinner at night and reading books and newspapers by firelight and taking walks in the twilight and sleeping—only sleeping—in the same bed.

Where once this life might have been full of the simple joy of a simple life well lived—a simple life that would be well deserved after the battles they fought—it is now…nothing.

They drift along, and they do not feel.

---

They grow old, by her Muggle standards, if not by his wizarding ones, and there are back aches and grey hairs and after a while she can barely see the words on the page and his twisted fingers can barely tie the knots. But life carries on as it always has, only now there is a sense of expectancy in the air. They are getting close, so close to him, and at times it seems as though there is nothing but a very thin veil between him and them, and surely some day soon a wind will blow it away….

---

She dies young, at the age of 79, and he does not outlive her by more than three lonely months. The newspapers report it, and the older witches and wizards--the ones who remember--mourn quietly and the younger ones say, "Who?" because over time his legend has overtaken both of theirs until only he is left and they are no longer the Trio. But that is how they would have wanted it, after all.

And they are buried beside him, on the grounds of Hogwarts, under a willow tree.

---

"When three points are connected and become a triangle, the sum of their angles is 180 degrees," Remus announced one day when they were fighting again. "This is also the angle of an about face, a complete change, a straight line made when two points are connected."

---

_This has been sitting on my hard drive for nearly a year now and I've been tweaking it since then; I'm still unsure about the ending. Any reviews will be appreciated._


End file.
